Women in a Man’s World

Irene Dorner blames herself â€" and her female colleagues â€" for the lack of women on Wall Street.

As the chief executive of HSBC North America, Ms. Dorner, 58, is one of the few women to have breached the upper levels of finance. But along the way, Ms. Dorner said, she didn’t push hard enough to change the “status quo” on male-dominated trading floors and executive suites. Rather, she said, she kept her head down, focusing on her own career.

“The women at the top of organizations that I know will tell you that we think that we’ve made it because we were born the way we are and can play by these rules without feeling damaged by them,” Ms. Dorner said. “Or, we’ve learned how to play by these rules and use them to our own advantage.”

“I suspect that we were simply not very good role models,” she added. “And there aren’t enough of us to be visible so that people can work out how to do what we did.”

Ms. Dorner and her peers in the upper echelons â€" like Ruth Porat at Morgan Stanley, Joan S. Solotar of the Blackstone Group, Edith W. Cooper of Goldman Sachs and Cecelia Stewart of Citigroup â€" are the latest generation of women making it in a man’s world.

Isabel Benham, who started her career as a bond analyst in 1934, was so worried about being taken seriously that she initially signed her reports using her first initial and middle name, “I. Hamilton Benham.” When Muriel Siebert became the first woman to own a seat on the New York Exchange in 1967, the Big Board had only men’s bathrooms. “Not since I was a baby had so many people been so interested in my bathroom habits,” she declared in her memoir.

Ms. Dorner, who started her career in 1982 as an in-house lawyer at the merchant banking arm of Midland Bank, recounted a gathering several years later at a bar with a group of male colleagues, who she said made misogynistic comments.

“It just was anachronistic â€" it was awful,” Ms. Dorner said. But “I didn’t complain. I, of course, ended up being the only woman there, and I have to say I had the most miserable day.”

The challenges are not unique to Wall Street. While women and men appear in the broad work force in equal numbers, few women make it to the executive suite, regardless of industry. And female chief executives like Indra K. Nooyi of Pepsico, Ursula M. Burns of Xerox and Marissa Mayer of Yahoo are even rarer.

Many companies are trying to close the gender gap, with varying degrees of success.

Big banks have created networking and mentorship programs to cultivate talented women. As a way to bolster the number of women with computer science and engineering degrees, nonprofit groups are focusing on teaching high school girls to code. Norway requires 40 percent of the board members of public companies to be women, a model that the rest of Europe is considering.

Sheryl K. Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, has helped start a national conversation over the issue with her best-selling book, “Lean In.” In it, Ms. Sandberg argues that women may be holding themselves back in the workplace “by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands and by pulling back when we should be leaning in.” Her position has prompted an angry response from some, who say Ms. Sandberg is blaming the victim.

But Ms. Dorner, too, says women on Wall Street need to advocate more forcefully for themselves. In many cases, she says, the problem of the glass ceiling is matched by what she calls the “sticky floor” â€" that is, women who remain in lower-tier jobs because they don’t proactively try to climb the corporate ladder.

“Women do funny things,” Ms. Dorner said. “They do things like work very hard and expect to be noticed for it â€" and they’re not, because it doesn’t work like that.”

Instead, Ms. Dorner argues that women need to take a page from their counterparts in pushing their own agenda and advancement. “I don’t think we need to suddenly flip and all be acting in a male way,” Ms. Dorner said, “but you can learn something from male behavior.”

“If you offer a woman a professional management opportunity or promotion â€" and I’ve had this happen to me â€" the first thing they do is produce a long list of pros and cons: ‘Oh, dear, what do I have to do with child care I must and go tell my husband,’ “ she said. “If you offer it to a guy, he’ll just say: ‘Well, thank you very much. I’ll do the best I can.’ ”

Ms. Dorner says she wishes she had spoken up earlier, by trying to reform practices and pushing for diversity programs. In her position, she said, she could have helped change the underlying cultural bias against women.

“I only realized what was happening when I was 50, because there I was, making my way in the unconscious rules,” Ms. Dorner said. “I really do think the next push has got to come from the senior middle-management women who must stand up and be counted on this earlier than I did.”

As she sees it, diversity is not just a moral issue, but also a good business decision. “I think that you are insane commercially if you run any corporation and you turn down the opportunity for different views, innovation and a different way of thinking.”